From the window of our little hotel in the Marais I look down into the fire station. The fire brigade are a fine bunch of fit-looking young Frenchmen. Before the weekend, in between callouts, they spent hours climbing up fire-truck ladders in fetchingly tight t-shirts and running shorts, to put up tricolor bunting. I was…

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the minister for women’s rights in President François Hollande’s new Socialist Party government, is by any measure an extraordinary person. The Moroccan-born daughter of a building worker, she is 34, has three children, became a councillor in Lyon in her early twenties to oppose Le Pen’s fascists and earned her political spurs as…

A high-powered delegation of UK lawyers backed by Britain’s Foreign Office today released a report, “Children in Military Custody”, detailing violations by Israel of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in its treatment of Palestinian detainees. Led by retired high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley, who is Jewish, the delegation, which…

Alan Turing, born 100 years ago this week, was one of the scientific geniuses of the 20th century, a key codebreaker for Britain in the Second World War and a pioneer of computing. In 1952 he was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated and died two years later from cyanide poisoning. Today London’s Science Museum…

Jimmy Carr is a hugely popular comedian, one of the smartest of the new generation of British entertainers. Like thousands of the rich here, he’s been using an offshore account, legally enough, to minimise his tax bill. This week the Murdoch-owned Times ran a report on his tax affairs and those of pro-Tory entertainer Gary…

British children on the breadline Here’s the reality of today’s Britain: 2.2m children are living in households on the brink of extreme poverty, and four out of five teachers see children arriving at school hungry. The figures emerge this week from The Guardian’s “Breadline Britain” project, an investigation into the human impact of the…

I went to the British Library’s current exhibition anticipating that it would be interesting. What I didn’t expect was that it would move me to tears. Writing Britain is a history of landscape presented through works of literature, from the original manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Dickens and Woolf. It reunited me with some…

John Lanchester’s novel Capital, which I began reading in the plane on the way over, is great preparation for a visit here. In it he takes the inhabitants of a gentrified London street – everyone from the financial trader to the family in the corner shop – through the GFC. It’s a funny, touching, hugely…

We’re embarking on the next phase of the great adventure – this time in Europe. Over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you our reports and thoughts on developments there. In the months since Come the Revolution was launched in Australia Alex has spoken to hundreds of people in bookshops from Brisbane to Bowral,…